With oral sex on the rise, oral cancer is also up, and by as much as 25 percent in the past few years alone--particularly among otherwise healthy 30- to 50-year-old nonsmokers, according to Mayo Clinic researchers. That's the bad news.

The goods news is that this rise is largely attributed to types of oral cancer caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which tend to be less aggressive and more responsive to treatment than the oral cancers traditionally seen in older patients who have been smoking and/or drinking for decades. What's more, the most common, called oropharyngeal cancer, appears to be highly treatable by surgical robots.

These results were "probably almost as much of a matter that these cancers are HPV-mediated for the most part and they respond much better to treatment," says study author and head and neck surgeon Eric Moore in a news release. He says that the important finding of this study, published this week in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, is that the treatment "preserved patients' ability to swallow and their speech performance was excellent."

Traditional surgical techniques, on the other hand, can require cutting and then reconstructing the jawbone, neck, and tongue, making the fast recovery time of patients undergoing robotic surgery particularly exciting.

Next up is to extend this study to a larger population at several institutions over a longer period of time to see whether these positive results hold.

For now, Moore's team is so confident in these results that, for those who don't want to be randomized into a Mayo Clinic trial, robotic surgery will be the primary treatment offered.

About the author

Elizabeth Armstrong Moore is based in Portland, Oregon, and has written for Wired, The Christian Science Monitor, and public radio. Her semi-obscure hobbies include climbing, billiards, board games that take up a lot of space, and piano.
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